Rev Blair

That might be true. Look at Rwanda. That was the biggest event, but it wasn't the only one. In many parts of the developing world, you can get an AK-47 for a chicken. That's not made up...I came across it on the UN site a few years ago when I was writing a thing on child soldiers. Interesting thing about AK-47s...kids can use them pretty easily and they work when filthy. Yeah, I'll take any time period that has indoor plumbing, having lived without it for some thankfully not-too-long periods of my life. The violence of the past doesn't absolve us though. The Nazi leadership had to answer for their war crimes. We never answered for ours. I don't think that winning should render absolution. At the very least we should take responsibility for what our countries did. I mention Dresden not just because of Vonnegut, but because it really was a joint crime. Canada, Britain, and the US were all in there like dirty shirts. The experts told them that dropping that number of bombs in such a small area would have devastating consequences for the civilians and the POWs being used as slave labour, but it didn't matter. It was vengeance as much as war. It's been mostly swept under the carpet and it likely wouldn't come up at all if one of the USA's greatest authors hadn't had the misfortune to have been there. What is terrorism though? Night bombings and raids in Afghanistan? I'd say yes. The Taliban aren't the ones responsible for most of those. The US, Canada, Britain, and the Netherlands (although the bombs are generally from the US) are. Blowing up civilians and soldiers with a road-side bomb is terrorism when they do it, but dropping bombs on civilians and soldiers isn't when we do it? Give me a break. Worse than that, it's counter-productive. You how to create a freedom-fighter/terrorist out of a moderate? Kill his family or his friends. We're in Afghanistan because somebody flew a couple of planes into a couple of office towers. In the grand scale of things, the damage wasn't that great. Let's face it, the architecture kind of looked like a couple of strip malls that got really tall, and (with apologies to anybody who suffered a personal loss) the death toll is nothing compared to what we've visited upon the Afghan people. What we're really mad about is that we thought we were untouchable and they showed us we weren't. The Taliban, according to reports from everybody from the Pentagon to my dog, are now gaining strength because we've pissed off so many otherwise moderate Afghans. They thought they had a right to do as they pleased and we are telling them they don't. We're all terrorists, I think. It still looks like all the freedom fighters on both sides are pretty determined to fight freedom too.

The scientific jury is still out on that. Whether the LIA was global or not though, its occurrence does not negate the science showing what's happening today. When I leave this house at 8:00, I have a choice of four different ways to go to get to my destination. Can you show me where I made that claim? Can you show me where any well informed scientist or lay person has made that claim? Your introduction of the LIA into the conversation is a strawman, and that strawman only works if you can show where I, or anybody else, have claimed that there was no warming or cooling in the past. While I question the LIA and the MWP because there is doubt about them in the scientific community, I certainly don't claim that there haven't been global climate changes in the past.

Hey, Mrs. Rev has a smile on her face, and at least part of that has to do with what I learned when I was a lad. It still doesn't replace what I know now though...not all of that smile is because I learned how to use my seven inch tongue, after all. It's not that there's no important data in paleo climatology. There is. That was then and this is now though. The circumstances are different, the situation is different, and the data is different. You've chosen the Little Ice Age though. It and the MWP are canards that generally come out when the denier side is losing. Prove that the MWP and LIA were both significant and global. Show that their effects were both relevant and beneficiary/detrimental on populations in areas that are densely populated today (no, I don't give a rat's ass about Hern the Hunted, or even Lief Erikson). Show that the effects of either are connected to today's warming. You refer to yourself as a skeptic, Lance. A skeptic reserves judgement and demands more information. You aren't doing that though. If you were being honestly skeptical, you would be giving greater weight to the greater weight of scientific evidence. Instead you are wavering between denying that weight of evidence on very unscientific grounds and then allowing the very same evidence without agreeing with the conclusions that evidence leads the experts to. It reminds me a lot of the Rolling Stones playing the el Macambo just before Keith got busted for smack. Muddy Waters went up on stage with them and said, "Everything gonna be alright," then Mick started hopping around like a chicken and stole yet another royalty cheque from poor old Muddy. Anyway, I'm going to bed. You can pick up the analogy where you want.

Yeah, I could have worded that better. Hell, I should have worded it better. The suburban rooftops are good for solar, the rural yards for wind. Suburbia is kind of different for that. In the cities, a lot of rooftops never see the sun. Similarly, rural yards on the Canadian prairies and the American Mid-West lack the obstructions that make wind power problematic in more densely populated areas. There is a lot of opportunity there.

Ah, guns. I understand how they work, and I've used them a fair bit. What I don't understand is the fetish some develop over them. Of course I don't really understand S&M or B&D either. I am pretty sure that if you guys in the US got your act together and regulated the hell out of guns, we'd have a lot fewer of them up here and our gang members would have to go back to stabbing each other. I'm all for that, because there aren't a lot of innocent bystanders to a knife fight. Your second amendment neither says what it means or means what it says. It is anachronistic, misinterpreted...mostly on purpose, and pretty damned stupid. I'm pretty sure this won't be a popular opinion, but if you aren't strong enough to recognize the failure of the second amendment to protect you from tyranny, at least grow a set and recognise that the NRA is at least as bad as any terrorist group and make the gun makers responsible for the end use of their product.

Ah, where to start? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Dresden? Vietnam? Cambodia? The Gulf War? The Iraq Attack? Dresden is good. Read Vonnegut, he'll explain it to you. He was there and it crept right into his story while he was using fiction to tell the truth. Dresden is also good because there is no doubt that the war against Germany had an awful lot to do with freedom. Still didn't keep us from firebombing a city full of civilians. Bombed them all to freedom. Some of them, like Vonnegut, were our own people...POWs we knew were there. Jesus we're ugly monkeys.

The "idea" above? Dude, when it gets warm, things melt. There is a whack of plant and animal matter trapped in the permafrost. When plant and animal matter thaw, they rot. When they rot, they emit methane. That's not an idea, those are facts. What are this number of negative feedbacks you envisage by the way? Have they been measured? There are scientists working in the arctic right now measuring the melting of the permafrost. Have you got scientists measuring the negative feedback loop that's supposed to counteract those effects? The difference between pessimists and optimists is that pessimists are, on very rare occasions, pleasantly surprised to be wrong. Optimists, on the other hand, are constantly disappointed. During the little ice age, Vikings went all the way to south of France just to score some mushrooms! Goats mated with mermaids and unicorns! Ducks could talk, but only in Latin! We aren't talking about the LIA, though. It's about as relevant to the present day as my first girlfriend is to my marriage. If you want to make the LIA relevant to the discussion, I would suggest that you first define it, second prove that it was global, and third show how it is relevant to current warming. If, and it's a pretty huge if, you can manage that, then you need to phone both my wife and some woman named Colleen (I'm pretty sure her last name has changed by now) and convince them that I deserve a threesome. Good luck with both. Or either. I can't speak for Russia, but the Canadian Shield...what's north of where we already grow crops...is pretty much rock. The farmland here gets worse as you head north. Even where the topsoil is deep enough to plant a crop, the soil quality is poor, with low levels of nitrogen and other nutrients. That's without getting into the problem of clearing trees. Except that desertification has increased with global warming in most of sub-Saharan Africa, and soil quality is poor in the areas where moisture levels have increased. There is little or no evidence pointing to an increased ability to mass produce food in the area. Nah, you've just forgotten that there's more to producing a crop than a little warm weather. Umm, worldwide we're talking about more than a billion displaced people. And the infrastructure that supports them. And the resource base that feeds and clothes them. Much of that is in the poorest areas on the planet, but a pretty good chunk of it is in the areas you think those billion people are going to be moving to. We're already dealing with a lot of xenophobia, cultural clashes, and some pretty brutal racism. Whaddya think it's gonna look like when a billion minorities come knocking on our doors looking for homes, jobs, and a place to continue their customs? Well the majority of the science...the vast majority...says that sea level rise will accelerate with warming. A foot is also a whole lot, since much of the world's coastline is less than a foot above sea level. There are also areas, like much of Canada's arctic and some pretty significant chunks of Europe and Asia, that are actually below sea level but protected by a stretch of coast that is less than a foot above sea level. Much of that area where you were planning, erroneously, to grow crops, suddenly becomes a saltwater marsh bigger than the Great Lakes. You know what's really interesting? The "Men in Black" episode of the X-Files (yeah the one with Alec Trebeck) where the army guy dressed like an alien gets abducted and is sitting there in his alien outfit smoking a cigarette and saying, "This can't be happening," over and over again. I love social commentary in popular culture, but I especially love the parts nobody really gets.

Depends which side you are on. Even repressive extremists like bin Laden think they are fighting for freedom. But, like George Carlin said, if firefighters fight fire and crime fighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight?

I like hydro because of the massive amount of power it can produce. It's relatively clean and the small scale and in-stream technologies that are now coming out make it even greener.

I have a dog named Max (because he was number four when we I stole him from a junkie, putting us one over the legal limit), and another named Sequoia (because that's the name they gave her at the shelter). Both are shepherd crosses. We also have three cats, Alex, Bailey and Megan. They don't like me much though, since they think I'm a dog.

If you look at suburban North America, we have a huge resource available. Look at all of those suburban rooftops. There is also a prety big resource in all of those rural yards that are suitable for small-scale wind power. What we are lacking is a way to install the technology. Most homeowners can't afford the expense.

Again, most of the experts disagree with you. First of all, the arctic melting is likely to lead to more temperature increase because of the vast amount of methane stored in the permafrost. Also, people do live up there. Maybe not a lot of people, but there are people there. Just the other day I was reading how a village in Nunavit was in trouble because flash flooding was washing away the infrastructure from right under their feet. Second of all, we are already facing food shortages and a further 2 degree temperature rise would cause more droughts and more floods. You may think we can just move the croplands north, but I don't know a lot of farmers who think you can grow crops in poor soil or on rocks, and the clearing of trees would be both cost prohibitive and an additional environmental disaster. Third of all, "Where the people live," includes places like Bangledesh, low lying parts of India, and virtually every temperate coastline on the planet. The cost of moving them will be incredible, and the social and economic upheaval from that will be terrible.

That's a bit of a strawman though. Nobody here is saying that we're going to experience runaway warming. Like I said, we aren't going to become Venus. A temperature rise of several degrees, say equal to that 120,000 years ago, would be catastrophic though. We aren't evolved to deal with physically or societally. Many, many of the current species on the planet would become extinct and others (most likely including us) would suffer greatly before things settled down or adaptation could take place. Since the majority of the data points to us being the variable in this case, and since we can do something about it, to bring that kind of problem down on our own heads would be ridiculous. What you are saying is the equivalent of saying that there are many car crashes, so it doesn't matter if we cause one.

Isn't that what the old perverts tell each other when ogling a 13 year old?

He did his fair share of drugs too, not to mention some pretty blatant promotion of them. His humour was smarter than Cheech and Chong's, but "Toledo Window Box" really isn't that different from the Yellow Album. I dunno. Does Miles Davis write Witches Brew without heroin? Does Hendrix do Purple Haze without acid? I've got the Grateful Dead playing right now, does that happen without drugs? What about some of Dylan's best imagery, or what The Band created? Do we get the Ancient Mariner, Alice in Wonderland, or most of Byron without drugs? What about Frankenstein? Is a world without Hunter Thompson or Jack Kerouac a good one? I'm not defending Winehouse's use of crack, I honestly don't see how that particular drug could enhance her creativity, but to deny that drug use has played a pretty large part in the arts...not just music...is to deny the evidence. Listen to Waylon Jennings back in his wild days, then some of his later schlock. Which do you turn up and which do you turn off? I don't think we can judge these people to be good or bad because of what they ingested, but to question that ingestion is to do just that. It's their choice, for their reasons, and it works for them for at least a short time.

I only speak English really...both proper Canadian English and the Saskatchewan redneck dialect. I also have a smattering of Cree and Ukrainian, mostly obscenity. I have a good working knowledge of various jargons as well...hot rod, photographic, carpentry, plumbing, landscaping etc. Those are roughly based on English, but you'd be hard-pressed to know that some days.

Yeah, because drug use practically stopped after Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison et al died. Or maybe not. People take drugs for a variety of reasons, have since before we started writing down our history, and always will.

Mine is an opinion based on multiple explanations of the process, statements by those involved in the process, and statements made by the US and other anti-AGW government officials. You can find a lot of at the UN site, but it's also been discussed in the mainstream media outside of the US, most notably the CBC, the BBC, The Guardian, etc. It's also been discussed or alluded on some science blogs. I'd like to see the politics taken out of it as well. Unfortunately, without the politics no action will be taken whatsoever. Actually, you are being nitpicky. The support varies from unrelated scientific studies from a variety of disciplines with findings that match global warming theory, to studies that are explicitly explain global warming, to work that looks at the effects of global warming without explicitly dealing with the theory itself. Yes. And the effects of methane are a great concern, especially when it comes to feedback loops such as melting permafrost. The role of water vapour has been pretty well understood since the 1950's and the way it keeps being brought up in the argument is a little misleading, since it also blocks heat, depending on the season and atmospheric conditions. CO2 is the big one because of the volume we are releasing though. Except that's not supported by the data. Nature has published at least one study showing that, as referred to by iNow, and NASA has said that the measurements have been going the other way since the 1970s. Besides, the hottest thing in the universe is some girl the neighbour boy and his friend were talking about the other day. Yeah, and I never said we were going to turn into Venus. The permafrost is melting though, releasing methane, the oceans are warming and we know they absorb less CO2 as they do, and then there's that all-important albedo effect. There are also loops going the other way, but they seem to have less strength, at least so far. And that's all taken into account in the overall science. Does the science not say, or does it offer up several theories? There's a fair bit of evidence questioning whether the LIA was even global or if was restricted mostly to the Northern Hemisphere as well. Are we heading back into the conspiracy theory? You know as well as anybody else that science is never fully accurate nor does it fully cover any area of research. There's always more work to do. There has been a whole whack of work done though, and the vast majority of it all points in the same general direction. We are changing the earth's climate with our actions. That's a gross oversimplification, but I'll go with it because none of us wants to write a novel. We know the approximate causes of those forcings though. Volcanic activity, sun cycles, and strikes from asteroids have all been implicated. None of those things are happening right now. Son of Sam wasn't innocent just because Jack the Ripper used a knife. It is fairly accurate and getting more accurate all of the time. Just as importantly, that record does not falsify the present science. They work with what they have. They adjust according to known variables and statistical norms. Those adjustments are subject to peer review. Not all of the adjusted data shows as large a variance as the data for Wellington either, just like the adjustments for some sites in the US during the 1930s didn't reflect all of the global numbers and had a very small effect overall. Again, peer review would catch that, or other data and interpretations would contradict it. This isn't the Winnipeg Police killing somebody for having the wrong colour of skin. Again, those "fudge factors" are subject to the review process. Sometimes the data is exact enough to do anything but take an educated guess, but what the guess is based on and the resulting interpretation are reviewed, criticized, and adjusted accordingly. When new data becomes available, that is taken into account. Every scientific study I've seen that uses them includes at least three possible levels as well, with an upper and lower limit as well as something in the mid-level. Actually, it all makes perfect sense. Warming, caused by some sort of forcing, releases GHGs. Those GHGs represent a positive feedback loop and drive more warming. Eventually a negative feedback loop or unrelated mitigating factor is introduced and cooling begins. The cooling allows the oceans to absorb more GHGs etc, slowly over-riding the original feedback loop. To put it into your crime scenario...a young man falls in with a bad group. He doesn't commit crimes at first, but eventually gives in to peer pressure. Then he meets a girl. At first he continues to commit crimes and hang out with his buddies. Then he drops his buddies and commits fewer crimes, but is still prone to "finding" things that don't belong to him. Eventually he quits doing even that. The science points to CO2 being the major culprit this time and us being the cause of the CO2. It doesn't discount methane, in fact it takes it into account and describes its effects. Same with CFCs and land use. It has discounted solar (along with massive volcanic activity) because the facts don't match what is happening, but it did not do so out of hand. In fact the data for those things was closely examined. Land use and agricultural practices are tied to the CO2 levels though, along with other GHGs. How we use the land affects sequestration as well as the release of GHGs. There's also the albedo effect. These are all taken into consideration in any number of studies. The bio-fuel fiasco shows a weakness in the political side of things, not the scientific side. Well, the rebound effect as the glaciers melt would be expected to lead to increased seismic activity, but I don't think we're there yet. You may think this all ideologicial, but I started my part of this little journey on the other side of things. I was worried about union jobs and have a deep love of big trucks and powerful motors. Maybe I'm just some back country rube, but the more of the science I read and the more of what I know of politics I examined, the more obvious it became that the planet is warming, we are playing the major role in that, and those promoting business as usual are the ones pushing an ideology. From an ideological point of view, I can think of nothing that would bring the capitalist/neo-liberal system to an end more fully and completely than doing nothing until there's some sort of ecological collapse. According to my ideology, I should be working overtime to promote the release of GHGs into the atmosphere. I'm not doing that though.

I saw something on the news here a few months ago that had somebody pushing this idea, and I think it's a good one. The thing I saw had a recommended sticker that would be mandatory for any product the manufacturer claimed was green. It had sections that would receive a check mark. I can't remember all the sections (there were ten of them), but there were, "Produced Locally," "Made from recycled materials," and "recyclable." The breakdown of support went like this: The manufacturers and Conservatives opposed it; the Liberals sat on the fence; the environmentalists, NDP, Bloc Quebecois, and Green Party supported it. It might seem like a non-partisan idea on the surface, but the politicians didn't see it that way at all.

I think we're...what's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah, boned. We're already seeing collapsing fish stocks and a loss of arable land. Climate change is just beginning to have an effect. We're short of water, short of food, and running out of natural resources. The thing is that over-population is at the very root of these things. Just try having a reasonable discussion about that with the political classes though...they'll either accuse you of wanting to institute eugenics, or say they will be accused of the same. The other choice is being compared to the Chinese government. Action to reduce population is politically untenable. The thing is that anybody with even a slight grasp of animal populations knows how this ends up. Overpopulation is followed by a population crash. Either something eats you, you run out of resources and starve, or you get sick and die. I've seen the cycle with gophers and coyotes, and it ain't pretty. We've disrupted much of the natural cycle with technology, and we actually have the technology to prevent an uncontrolled crash, but we lack the will to do anything about it politically. So I think it will end with resource wars, starvation, and plagues. We could avoid that, but we won't.

No, sorry, you are wrong. The scientific part of the process is a review of the scientific papers. It is done first. Then the political people come in. They fight over wording. Typically the wording and the weight given to the pro-warming science is softened. A lot of that is at the urging of the United States, with back-up from such environmental luminaries as the United Arab Emirates and China. Now that Canada has a regressive anti-science government, we're in there like a dirty shirt too, taking over for the defunct Howard government in Australia. That's not a subjective judgement, that's the documented reality of the IPCC process.

If I was referring to you specifically, JohnB, I would have used your name. I'm not shy. I was referring to the larger debate...the one that's been raging in the media, not the science journals. In the science journals, the debate is largely over. Oh, there are questions. That's a sign of healthy science. There isn't much showing the overall theory wrong though. Of course the situation is complex. The IPCC process is also politicized, but that politicization generally leans towards the denier governments and their operatives, not those who accept the theory. What the UN does is look at and consider the peer-reviewed science on the subject, then come up with an overview. The politics happens AFTER the science. By the way, IPCC scientists aren't paid by the UN. I've seen a lot of misunderstandings about that in other places, so I think it's a good idea to note it before the claim gets made here. Would you, John B, agree that the vast majority of the peer-reviewed science done on the subject over the last century supports anthropogenic global warming theory? Would you also agree that C02 is a greenhouse gas? Would you also agree that the science shows that the sun is not responsible for current warming? Would you agree that feedback loops, both positive and negative, are very likely affecting how fast warming is happening. Would you agree that other mitigating factors, such as particulates in the air, El Nino/La Nina cycles, etc. have an effect? This is all stuff that's been covered by the science already. You have not explained what is causing the warming if CO2 isn't. Simply saying that we're coming out of the little ice age doesn't really cut it...you have to define that period and tell us why the present warming is happening.

Thank you, lucaspa. That actually helps a fair bit. Even the part about the White Buffalo, which answers an unstated question about something so incredibly off-topic that some neo-mystics are likely to be a little pissed at me for a year or so.

It's not just drugs, Phi, it's the ravages of poverty in general. The US war on drugs is incredibly harmful socially though. Treating a medical problem as a crime while enforcing a prohibition that targets certain segments of the population more than others and feeds crime profits is bad policy at best.

There are literally thousands of people making a living in computers, genetic research, and digital photography. Is that just greed and avarice, or did changes in knowledge and technology create new opportunities in existing fields? I just wrote a manual on operating the new equipment at a local micro-brewery. Does that my purchase of beer suspect? I have a feeling that part of the reason I got that gig was because I'm familiar with their products (except for the pale ale...I dislike pale ales), and a supporter of the theory behind those products (craft-brewed in small batches). Does that make what I wrote for them suspect? Of course not. I wrote about how their new system works according to the available data. I didn't embellish, I worked from the facts. This machine is now controlled by this computer. It adds x and keeps a constant temperature of y. Have Exxon and other vested interests supported the publication of non-factual arguments, often presented to the public as science, because of their interests? You bet they have. And there's the split. It's just like the creationists and the IDers teaching the controversy. It's just like the tobacco companies hiring people to lie for them. Do ya really think GreenPeace was able to pony up the cash to bribe every scientist doing original work? Did the environmentalists and the socialists bribe the editors of Nature to manipulate the peer review process? Did Al Gore's forebearers pay people to create a theory just in case one of their progeny needed a gig one day? There's a Canadian man named Maurice Strong who regularly gets accused of championing the Kyoto Accord because he's now importing Chinese cars to Canada. Never mind that the Chinese didn't have an auto industry when Kyoto was being negotiated, or that they have tighter emissions standards than either the US or Canada, good old Mo apparently hatched this conspiracy single-handedly back in the 80's, then created climate change theory, manipulated the UN, and influenced everybody involved in the original agreement just so he could import cars 20 years later. When I hear the argument that there's some sort of conspiracy to promote climate change, I always think of Mo and his detractors.